Item — HN Reader

Uh, I really disagree with this article's premise. The author identifies a page he added that was deleted, and his contribution was lost (on more than one occasion), and cites this as evidence of wikipedia's inevitable demise.

Though such inefficiencies are unfortunate, and discouraging, I think they only slow progress. I think evenutally an article on Hemovidin will be written and not deleted, and I wouldn't be surprised if most encyclopedias don't even have such an entry.

There is some clunkiness around wikipedia, but compared to academia (which almost everybody without journal access and fluency in english is restricted from reading) it's by far superior. In fact, I can't think of another better source of reliable information that is freely and widely accessible.

1 comments

It's part of a larger trend described here that turn the site into what's essentially maintenance mode vs thriving with new content:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/520446/the-decline-of-wik...

It might survive but not the way intended.

I've been reading "Wikipedia is about to die! Everyone is about to leave!" articles for almost a decade. It's still there. Similarly, the low-hanging fruit has already been done. Maintenance-mode was always going to be on the cards.

The centrepiece in TFA is about a two-paragraph, four-sentence article. It's a terrible article, and should be rolled into another one. Any article that could be given in two tweets is a trivia-night factoid, not an article - I fundamentally disagree with TFA that it's "articles like this that make Wikipedia great". These kind of brief factoids are the type of content that shitty clickfarms have.

TFA even uses Britannica as a defense, saying that it has an article... but click on the link, and "Britannica does not currently have an article on this topic". Hemovanadin has, however, been rolled into another article - 'cell pigmentation'. Not exactly a sterling defense for the author.

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I always see this happen with these bitter predictions of WP's death. People are either complaining about disagreement on an obviously subjective topic (like a politician's bio), or their chain-of-evidence is suspect, like in this case.

Here are the stats: https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editor_...

Look at the blue columns - number of editors per month/quarter with 5 and 100 edits - and it's been pretty consistent since 2010. Yeah, the heady days of 2007/08 are gone, but again, low-hanging fruit.

> Similarly, the low-hanging fruit has already been done

That's a popular reply to criticism of the poor status of the Wikipedia community, but it's largely false for anything that is not an US-centric vision of popular topics on Western culture.

As I've written elsewhere, the toxic culture and ossified rules would make it impossible nowadays to bootstrap the collaboration efforts needed to fix the well-known biases in coverage. The same policies that keep the current content to crumble from bots and advertisers prevent us from regaining the original drive of the original writing effort.

> It's a terrible article,

That's how all articles in Wikipedia started.

> and should be rolled into another one. That's a non-sequitur. If it's a notable independent topic, it should exist on its own, unless there are good reasons why it should be included only as part of a larger article where it's a natural fit.

Most often that not, there is no other place where that content would make sense as a section of a larger topic, so that mindset will ultimately lead to deletion of notable and well-referenced content.